A Comparative Evaluation of Public Cloud Platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform

This paper presents a structured comparative evaluation of three major public cloud platforms, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with respect to deployment complexity, cost characteristics, and usability. The analysis is based on an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) deployment of a representative multi-tier web application. The evaluation considers key metrics including virtual machine provisioning latency, compute and storage cost efficiency, availability of managed services, and developer onboarding overhead. The results highlight substantive differences in platform maturity, operational usability, and pricing transparency, providing empirical insights to support informed cloud platform selection for practical application deployment scenarios.